One of the value-added services supplied by wireless network service providers is to provide personalized services based on the location of a subscriber. The coordinates for a mobile customer premises equipment (CPE), obtained by using the Global Positioning System (GPS), are often shown in a latitude and longitude. This location information is valuable to network service providers. By gathering the location information about a CPE, network service providers can manage network resources more efficiently, support traffic monitoring more effectively, and develop a more economic frequency reuse plan. Furthermore, network service providers can deploy location-based applications, such as navigation services, E911 services, and real-time advertisement, based on the geographic location of a CPE.
A session in the subscription-based wireless network defines a communication task between a base transceiver station (BTS) and a CPE. A session profile contains all but location information related to the session between the BTS and the CPE. The session profile includes information such as the power level of the physical layer, the frequency allocation of the medium access control layer, the provisioning parameters of quality of service, and accounting information. The CPE may support multiple sessions simultaneously.
Other statistics, such as the duration of the session, the bandwidth consumed by the session, the speed of the movement of the CPE, also provide important information about the CPE. The GPS coordinates for a location, the session profile, and the statistics information about the CPE facilitate the creation of new services, which, in turn, generate more revenue for network service providers.
A conventional wireless communication system that provides location-based services requires multiple BTSs to gather information about a CPE and it also requires a back-end server to collect information about the CPE from all participating BTSs and determine the GPS location of the CPE. There are many ways to determine the location of a CPE, based on the information collected by multiple BTSs.
In a wireless communication system with BTSs that have multiple antennas, it could take only one BTS to monitor and track the movement of a CPE. This BTS gathers the information from all receiving antennas and then retrieves helpful information. It is thus to provide the capability to process the information to determine the GPS coordinates for a CPE and create innovative services.
An advantage of the invention is that it improves the prior art solutions by offering a better way to determine the GPS location of a CPE while the system only requires one BTS.